#7 Making space

Welcome to blog post #7 of The Insightful Creative.

This coming Monday, I’ll be interviewed for an episode of the Institute for Music Leadership (IML) podcast Careers in Crescendo at the Eastman School of Music. I’m excited to talk about this blog and my curiosity surrounding creativity and insights. As I prepare for the episode, several ideas have been percolating for me over the past week.

One of my favorite blogs, The Marginalian, contains some of the most beautiful writings on art, creativity, and being human. Through that blog, I discovered a touching children’s book titled Making Space by Paola Quintavalle, with illustrations by Miguel Tanco.

In it, Quintavalle explores the different aspects of life we can make space for, including:

- Standing up to your fears  
- What you don’t know yet  
- Something you are good at  
- A hand to hold, and when it’s time, for letting go  
- Taking a chance  
- What can bring you joy

This past year, I made space for something unexpected: I wrote my first book, Modal Flute Warmup: Sound Discovery and Color Palette Expansion. Published by Conway Publications, it’s now available at several flute retailers. During the writing process, I had numerous conversations with teachers, colleagues, and friends about “making space” or “finding space” in our teaching and playing. Alexander Teacher and Body Mapping specialists Lea Pearson and Katie Fittipaldi shared invaluable ideas with me on space and discovery — concepts that were instrumental in shaping the book.

Making space for discovery in our daily lives can help lead us to what is “essential.” In his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown discusses how to focus on what’s truly important. He writes: Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.

McKeown contrasts the Essentialist approach with the Nonessentialist, using two images: Both figures exert the same amount of effort, but in the first image, that energy is scattered across numerous activities. In the second, the energy is focused on fewer tasks, leading to more impactful outcomes.

Living as an Essentialist means designing your life intentionally and being willing to make tough trade-offs.

Figuring out what’s essential is deeply personal. For me, some things stay the same, but sometimes I’m drawn to something unexpected (like my book, for example). Poet Mary Oliver says: “My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.”

What are you making space for today?